Coinbase offers four weeks off to ‘recharge’

The COVID-19 pandemic has triggered a mental health crisis.

Stress and burnout have reached an all time high over the past two years as employees have struggled to figure out how to balance their work and personal lives while living through a healthcare crisis.

Some have felt like they are not just working from home, but actually living at work.

The burnout crisis is pushing many employees to re-evaluate out of the world of work, and therefore quitting their stressful jobs for new opportunities with better work-life balance.

Coinbase and burnout

Amid the burnout crisis and the ‘Great Resignation’, many employers are starting to rethink how they help their employees switch off and recharge from work.

Last year the likes of Bumble and LinkedIn shut down for a week to allow employees recharge.

Cryptocurrency giant Coinbase also gave their employees an extra week off to prevent burnout in 2020; the company then upped this to two weeks in 2021.

But now, given the pandemic is surging in the US, Coinbase has announced it will close down for four recharge weeks in 2022 – this is the equivalent of one per quarter.

In a blog post, CPO L J Brock explained: “We work incredibly hard at Coinbase — for most of us, Coinbase is the most intense place we’ve ever worked. That intensity is only magnified by the current moment in crypto, and it often results in long days and long weeks.

“However, because of that intensity, we’re also deliberate about finding time to recover between sprints. How deliberate?

“Four weeks of coordinated recharge time might sound like a lot of time off for a company in hypergrowth, but given the intensity of our work throughout the year, we think this is the best way to ensure our pace is sustainable for the long term.”

Brock noted that Coinbase’s new 2022 policy came on the back of employee feedback. “In fact, 52% of employees said recharge days and weeks were the primary tool that helped them rest and recover in 2021.”

While Coinbase has not committed itself to recharge weeks beyond this year, it is very clear about how seriously it takes employees recharging in 2022.

Brock wrote: “We know that, despite our best intentions, there are times when some employees need to work through a recharge week. When this happens, we do our best to make it up to them so they have dedicated time to recharge, too.

“We’re OK with this tradeoff — we prefer to implement a solution that regularly works for 90% of employees than to endlessly search for an elusive “perfect” solution.”

It is easy for employers think they can’t afford to shut down their offices for a week to enable staff to recharge. But in light of the competitive war for talent, it seems they can’t afford not to.